2876. Town Square statue

Clifford had no idea when the casual photo was taken that it would be used one day as a model to create his statue in the town square. At that time he was only twenty-two and hadn’t even begun to pursue his area of expertise. In fact at that stage of his life the word “blog” hadn’t even been coined, let alone “internet” and “the cloud” and “spam”.

The photograph, from which his likeness had been taken, was a group photo. He and half a dozen of his friends had just finished playing a game of soccer and were all muddy and sweaty. It was Clifford’s stance in the photo that was the drawcard. It was perfect for the statue.

All this was yesteryear. Clifford is long dead and the statue honouring him was erected maybe twenty years ago. People pass the statue every day and no one takes much notice. Certainly no one knows his name or what it was that he achieved. In fact, an aspiring journalist decided to investigate Clifford’s achievements and write an article about him for the local paper.

It was discovered that Clifford’s parents were racist, sexist, ageist, transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, white descendants of men whose next door neighbours were toxic male slave owners. Who cares what Clifford achieved? Within a week the statue was covered in red paint and rotten eggs. Next Thursday the Town Council have ordered the statue’s removal. Good riddance to it.  Hopefully no one will have glued themselves to it. A replacement statue of Barbie has been commissioned.

2811. Puppetry

Blondie was seized with an idea. He would make some puppets and put on a puppet show for children. He would email primary schools and say “Hey! I do puppet shows. Are you interested?”

He read all about it online. He built and sewed a tent like he’d seen in Italy. Either he could operate glove puppets from below, or he could operate string puppets from above.

Next he made some puppets. At first they weren’t very good, but he got better at it and in the end he had five quite good rod puppets operated by string pulleys.

All he needed now was a story. He searched the internet but any story he came across seemed a bit corny. In the end he settled on a story about a silly clown who was arrested by the police for disturbing everyone. It was quite fun.

The first interest expressed by a school came in. How exciting! Blondie set everything up in the school library. The children sat on the floor. The show began. The children laughed and clapped and cheered. It was a great success. Although Blondie didn’t charge much the Head Teacher informed him that he would not be paid.

Of the five characters four were men. Why was everyone white? Here we are trying to defund the police and you have a policeman as the hero. Where were the transgender characters? Why did you have a male character fall in love with the sole female? How predictable. Regarding the baby that appeared at the end… did a stork bring it? Was it found in a cabbage patch? What pronouns did the characters want? Or were you happy to step all over people – albeit puppets – and disregard their feelings. No! You shall certainly not get paid, and I shall be recommending to the State’s Education Board that you be banned from further performances in schools.

Blondie went home, burnt his puppetry collection, and made himself a nice cup of coffee.

2659. A national census

Hello every person. This is part of the national census being conducted on the evening of March 9^th. You have only four months to fill it out. Given the sensitivity in today’s world of many of the questions asked in yesteryear, today’s census has only the one question.

Question 1. What a catastrophe! What a shameless display of irresponsible devastation! What wreckage! Mindless debris! Kitchen scraps of pseudo-intellectual rubble! Higgledy-piggledy unmitigated nonsense! Sacks of mouth-spewing garbage!

We respect your right to say what you think, but…

Get a life, you retarded hedgehog! You aphis-ridden raspberry bush. Nest of rotten skylark’s eggs. Broken peacock’s tail-feathers. Dead mosquito-glutted dragonfly’s stagnant creek. Dinosaur turds. Murderous lump of foul jelly. Shakespearian sonnet. Amorphous hunk of incontinent confectionery. Dried-up udder of a moose bull’s mother. Stag plaque. Duck’s bladder. Armpit of bottled quince jelly. Ashtray.

With your opinions have you ever thought of running as a candidate for (enter the name of the Political Party you most detest)?

Please post this completed census form in the envelope provided.

2627. Witch Woke

When Witch Woke caught Hansel and Gretel pinching bits of confectionary off her candy house she grabbed hold of them and dragged them kicking and screaming inside.

Tying them down at the kitchen table she proceeded to tell them that Santa Claus wasn’t true, and the Tooth Fairy wasn’t true, and the Stork didn’t bring babies, and there were never Three Little Pigs, and the Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood was about rape, and so on and so forth. She spelt out that their propensity to nick candy off her house was a direct result of the misinformation that had been thrust down their throats throughout their innocent lives. Lies breed venality and sleaze.

When she had ended correcting all the falsehoods they had been fed, as the story itself should have gone, she ate them for dinner.

2504. Job interview

I’m sorry Doctor Okonkwo. You might have a doctorate in Aerodynamics and such qualifications would sometimes suit such a job as ours, but unfortunately we cannot discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or genetic information.

You seem to scream unsuitability in as much as you have a flat nose, are black, a follower of African animism, are not descended from cannibals, hail from Swaziland, identify as male, are over 30 years old, are unmarried, have dated women, pretend you’re not gay, identify yourself with unacceptable pronouns, have a sperm count that is far too high, are in a wheelchair, have DNA that doesn’t match the boss’s family tree, don’t purport to be descended from slaves, and refuse to get inoculated against chimpanzee pox. In such circumstances your invention that enables time travel through space worms to other dimensions is completely irrelevant.

Next!

I’m sorry Doctor von Eberhardt. You might have a doctorate in Compressible Flow and such qualifications would sometimes suit such a job as ours, but unfortunately we cannot discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or genetic information.

You seem to scream unsuitability in as much as you have a pointy nose, are white, an enthusiastic Protestant, are descended from the Lord of a medieval fiefdom, hail from a section of Germany that no one has ever heard of, identify as female, are under 40 years old, are married, have dated men, refuse to refer to yourself as a birthing assortment of mammary glands, identify yourself with unacceptable pronouns, are not in a wheelchair, have DNA that doesn’t match the boss’s family tree, don’t have slave owners in your ancestry so you can’t apologise, and refuse to get inoculated against orangutan pox. In such circumstances your invention that enables helicopters to fly in an alien sky that is utterly devoid of gas is completely irrelevant.

Next!

2437. A paradigm of pedagogy

(Pre-note: I’m not overly happy with this story because it’s too political, but I’m old and tired and will post it so as to get on with writing more murderous ones).

Evangeline was a highly qualified school teacher. She (pronoun of choice) was, to say the least, a state-of-the-art teacher. What she didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing. How she taught was the paradigm of pedagogy.

Persons! Persons! she would say. We are coming into Summer Time and there’s a mnemonic to help us remember. Spring back; Fall forward. It will tell us how to reset your phones. Say it together: Spring back; Fall forward. Or is it the other way around? Who cares? The phone company will change it for you automatically without your needing to do a thing.

Now for the calendar. Thirty days has September, August, March, and December. It’s something like that but facts don’t really matter so long as you know when your birthday is.

Now I will give you a little lesson in memorizing things. Always rhyme a word in your head. You will remember the rhyme and won’t forget the thing you have to remember. For homework I want you to make a list of every naughty word you can think of. Tomorrow we will make a combined list and find words that rhyme with them. That way you will remember them. There is to be no help from parents, is that clear?

Now, finally, Cornelius found a prophylactic on the patio. Yes Warwick? What is it?

Warwick: What’s a patio?

Evangeline: Never mind about such things, Warwick. I want you to go out into the corridor and tell the white kids they can come in now. But first, would everyone move over to the other side of the room.

2435. Jack’s babies

Jack Higgins had three daughters – April Higgins, May Higgins, and June Higgins. He was fast running out of appropriate month’s names for girls. What a relief it was to at last have a boy whom he named August Higgins. The names had little to do with the months they were born. The names were used simply because it was cute.

The middle names were another matter altogether. The middle names were the surnames of the fathers. There was April Dyer Higgins, May Butterworth Higgins, June Abbot Higgins, and August Bain Higgins. It was a good way to remember whose child was whose.

Jack was expecting again. The middle name was all settled – Verdonk-Bocxe. He got the name out of the paper because he didn’t know the name of the father. But as for the first name, Jack was in a quandary. It was impossible. Any suggestions?

2421. Happy Birthing Personage Day!

Ever since he was four Caleb had wanted to be an otorhinolaryngologist when he grew up. No one knows why he suddenly developed at interest in otorhinolaryngology but he did. As his birthing personage observed, at first we thought it was simply a vestige of aberrant behaviour instilled in him at the kindergarten, but we quickly disabused ourselves of the notion when he threatened that if he didn’t get his way he would become a teacher instead and espouse transgender critical race theory.

We hoped that the special book we bought him for his fifth birthday would help sort a few things out, but already Little Miss Muffat and Little Jack Horner are doing things behind the bike shed that we didn’t give a thought to doing before Year 11. As for Jack and Jill falling down the hill and Humpty-Dumpty falling off a wall… well… it simply consolidated his interest in otorhinolaryngology.

We dread the day when he gets to page 23 of his “Birthing Personage Goose” book that we gave him and discovers over-sexed Little Bo Peep and what Jack-Be-Nimble is doing to Peep’s sheep.

We’re thinking of dumping his childhood altogether and getting him started on harmless Quantum Mechanics.

2393. Angel of mercy

(The stories are back! – albeit erratically. I shall restart with a story that some readers may not like!)

It was extraordinary. Drew was more than aware that he had died suddenly. He was sitting in his armchair early on a Friday morning. Next to his armchair was a little coffee table with his mug of coffee and a slice of marmalade on toast. He had just had his first bite of toast when next thing an angel was leading him towards the gates of Paradise.

What a lovely angel! So seraphic! So kind! The angel led Drew by the hand.

“We are heading towards the Gates,” said the angel. Drew could already feel the effects of Heaven emanating towards him.

“To quote Saint Paul,” said the angel, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart the things that God has in store… You know the quotation I’m sure.”

 “Of course I do,” said Drew.

“You realize,” said the angel, “that if you hadn’t put so much salt in your food and into cooking that you could have extended your life on earth by almost two years.”

Drew hung his head in shame.

“You realize,” said the angel, “that if you had been more careful to eat only organically grown vegetables that you could have extended your life on earth by two further years.”

Drew hung his head further in shame.

“You realize,” said the angel, “that if you had bought an electric car instead of that beat-up old bomb you drove around in you’d be going through that gate there into Paradise and not through this door here where there is an eternity of weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

“The old bomb was all I could afford,” said Drew.

With that the angel opened the door and flung Drew in.

“Now who is next on the list?” asked the angel looking at her clipboard.

“How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got that job as the angel I have no idea,” said Drew as he disappeared into the nothing world.

Story 361: Masterpiece

This is the sixth day of seven days in which an earlier story is repeated. Today it is Story 361: “Masterpiece”. It was first posted on 26 January 2016.

Isabelle won the prestigious art award. Her submission was entitled Oh kinaesthetic and forever tomorrow. It was a fabulously longish title for such an original piece.

The judges were astounded. Their decision was unanimous. See how the art work changes from one viewing to another! See how there can be no single-only original version; each “copy” is the original version! See how the work reflects aspects of each person who contemplates it!

The masterpiece was simply each person’s blank computer screen. Every screen displayed a different arrangement of similar things: different arrangements of fly dirt, and sneeze globules, and fingerprints, and smears! It was a living work of art. People began doing all sorts of things in front of their computer screens in order to add to the value and “inner statement” of their “original”. One enterprising interpreter actually turned the screen on! Electric! An electrifying interpretation! Another took a selfie with the inbuilt cam. Was that interpretation not bordering on being slightly too Robert Mapplethorpe? Another entrepreneur (one could not use the word artist as it was simply a variation of Isabelle’s masterpiece) managed to stuff their entire computer screen inside a greatly stretched condom. Oh the waste! The squandering of a perfectly good piece of rubber! There was no way in hell it could be recycled – which was the point they were trying to make: “Recycle your raincoat”.

Isabelle planned to go to the Caribbean on the prize-money, to gather inspiration for further works. She accepted the prize with humility: “Thank you,” she said, with that noble simplicity born of greatness. “Thank you to every person in the world. You know who you are.”